Open source technology has been around for quite some time and has struggled over the years to place itself in the higher echelons of business and government. The United States’ current President, Barack Obama, has been a vocal proponent of an open and transparent administration. To further emphasize this, the President recently approved the use of the open source CMS (content management system) Drupal for the WhiteHouse.gov web site.
About Drupal
Drupal is a free open source CMS that allows easy publishing and managing of web sites. There are tens of thousands of web sites online now that utilize the program and include site types such as community web portals, corporate web sites, resource directories and even social networking sites.
The program is designed to allow quick additions of modules that enable a web site to expand its functionality. Some of these modules allow for newsletter publication, picture galleries, e-commerce and much more.
As Drupal is open source software, it is constantly being checked, debugged and new updates are constantly being released. The advantage of this is ensuring that the safest and most secure edition is available to its users.
The word from Dries Buytaert
According to Dries Buytaert, creator and founder of Drupal, his software is well matched and up to the task of helping further the platform of an open and transparent government. He goes on further to state “Drupal’s flexibility and modularity enables organizations to build sites quickly at lower cost than most other systems.” Dries feels this move to use open source technology and software indicates that governments are realizing that open source does not present any added risks when compared to propriety software.
One important point Dries brings up is the ability for the Drupal-run WhiteHouse.gov web site to allow for open communication and participation. This, by itself, is worth seeing the new site and checking out what one can accomplish with respect to open participation.
Not the only government site
Surprisingly, the WhiteHouse.gov is just the pinnacle of government offices using Drupal to publish their web sites. The Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, the General Service Administration and the Department of Education have all been using the Drupal CMS for some time.
Other large business, company and entity web sites currently running on Drupal include the New York Observer, Yahoo! Research, Christian Assemblies International and Sony Music. The list of Drupal-run web sites continues to grow at a rapid pace.
Future looking open
Going on into the future, the hope is that with Drupal’s latest coup of the White House web site, other government agencies, big businesses and even government entities world-wide will see the awesome potential of open source software and technology. Further, this may also show the world that open source technology is a huge step in the right direction – especially in the area of cutting costs. Perhaps this recent Presidential approval will start a web site trend and we’ll begin to see more and more “big guys” realize the advantages of open source.
November 4th, 2009 at 1:34 am
Gotta love open source. I love Joomla and wordpress. Don’t know too much about Drupal though.
November 11th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
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